Hands-on Rhetoric, Teaching & Craft in a Digitized World

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disruption as storytelling device

I love this post from my new MOOC colleague for many reasons but perhaps most of all because it has us thinking about the MOOC itself as a narrative. My dear grad school mentor, Jim Corder, said, “Life is a narrative we make, or not, that only exists in our own little fictions.” Our EDC MOOC is an open learning space that we haven’t even entered yet. I don’t even remember how to get there–which will be somewhere in Coursera, though under the auspices of the University of Edinburgh. The MOOC student interaction right now is all over the Web (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.) and the course doesn’t actually begin until the end of this month. We have all just built our own learning community sparked by our signing up for the MOOC and informally agreeing to interact ahead of time. I don’t even know how that started (my friend in the MOOC was doing early interaction and that sounded fun so here I am . . . wherever “here” is).

I was just listing to the radio briefly as I passed between rooms and heard a novelist in interview saying how she (and all creative writers) needs to construct a disruption in a situation in order to be able to go on to tell a story, and of course this rings true – we all know narrative technique well enough to know the importance of the initial ‘crisis’… but what interested me was how that obvious truism suddenly struck me as just as true of the sort of creative writing we are engaging in as students in this course, and how the course itself is an emerging narrative enabled by an initial discourse on how ‘disruptive’ the mooc is to everything and anything in higher education: it’s irrelevant whether we take it as ‘true’ or not, we simply need to suspend disbelief in order to engage in the joys of…